Revolting others: Disgusted bodies as a function of colonial continuity in Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific

Abstract

This thesis examines the continuity of colonial identities in Aotearoa New Zealand and Pacific contexts in terms of an affective disgust for others, with regard to an embodied sensory response to the world. This study demonstrates that the revolted sensation in these contexts is an operation of 'othering,' from which a putative white male heterosexual subjecthood emerges. By addressing the embodied relations of this subject-hood, the thesis addresses a sensorial lack in the archive, which has obscured the continuity of an asymmetrical power relation in what is termed the 'post-colonial' era. Refusing the critical safety of a post-colonial condition, this thesis argues that we exist in a 'colonial present.' In the 'present,' colonialism is preserved in our sensorial relation to the world, which informs our national identity as New Zealanders. In both the colonial Pacific and the settler-colonial New Zealand contexts, this disgusted subject-hood is expressed in and through different constellations of 'colonizing aesthetics,' which this thesis terms the 'disgust-beauty amalgam' of colonial subjectivity. Two separate geographical contexts are utilized to demonstrate a fundamental difference in the way disgust functions in respective colonial environments. In the eighteenth-century Pacific, the indigenous body is represented in monstrous and excessive ways by the disgust-beauty complex, which functions to make it irrevocably Other to the colonial subject in the moment of encounter. Concerning Aotearoa New Zealand, this study demonstrates the ways in which disgust informs the invention of a national identity in settler-colonial states. By addressing the temporal stability of the constructed norm of a 'New Zealander,' as embodied by a white male heterosexual Pākehā, this thesis shows the way disgust continues to naturalise the bodies of these second settlers in this place over time. The way in which the settler subject aesthetically codes the bodies of both indigenous (Māori) and exogenous (migrant) in New Zealand as variously 'beautiful' and 'revolting' others demonstrates the ongoing function of disgust in authorising settler-colonial presence in this country. In addressing the greasy embodied matter which disgusts us, this thesis suggests the ways colonial aversions remain embedded in our sensorium: it is an embodied nationalism distinguishing 'self' from ʻother'.